Raccoon Mountain repair bill to cost TVA more than $50M

The Tennessee Valley Authority expects to spend $55 million to fix a design flaw at its Raccoon Mountain Pumped Storage Facility near Chattanooga and may have to delay scheduled closings of some of its oldest coal-fired units while such repairs continue until 2014.

But TVA's chief generation officer says the costs could have been far greater if cracked rotors in the hydroelectric station had not been identified and an accident occurred.

"This is a situation that could have been devastating," TVA Executive Vice President Kim Greene told the TVA board last week. "We've taken proactive steps to inspect the units and take them down ... as we have discovered significant cracking in the rotors."